THE OPENING
On the night of the premiere, December 11, 1896, the Theatre Nouveau in the Rue Blanche was overflowing with intellectuals of all stripes -- the brightest minds of Paris had all turned out to see Jarry's debut as a dramatist. No one had any idea what to expect; it is a safe bet that there wasn't anyone in the audience who was prepared for what was to follow.

Attired in a baggy black suit, Jarry addressed the audience for about 10 minutes: "You are free to see in Monsieur Ubu as many allusions as you like, or if you prefer, just a plain puppet, a schoolboy's caricature of one of his teachers who represented for him everything in the world that is grotesque."

The curtain inched its way up. The audience had been loud and restless during Jarry's speech, but they calmed down a little as the magnificent actor Fermin Gemier, on loan from the Comedie Francaise, strode to center stage...

And now Gemier bellowed a single word in a voice that was brazen and mechanical like Jarry's own, but far more horrifying: "MERDRE!" [That is, "merde," the French word for "shit," with an extra "r," to make "shitr."] He was unable to get a word in edgewise for the next fifteen minutes. Never in modern drama had anyone used such language. A number of faint-hearted auditors fled, shrieking, up the aisles of the theatre. A melee broke out in the orchestra pit, punctuated by flailing limbs and threatening fists. In the front rows, Jarry's numerous supporters yelled, "You wouldn't have understood Shakespeare or Wagner, either."

Some members of the audience were so confused that they applauded approvingly and whistled derisively at the same time. At last, Gemier managed to call the raging house to order, then proceeded with the play's next line -- another "Merdre!" Once again, pandemonium reigned supreme. Eventually, however, Gemier was able to quiet the raging multitudes to get on with the business at hand -- which consisted of murdering, pillaging, and seizing power by brute force. Never before had any play taken such a dim view of humanity.

William Butler Yeats happened to be in the audience that night, and wrote:

"I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de L'Oeuvre... The audience shake their fists at one another, and [my companion] whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," and explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of king, carries for a sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, "After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God."

THE REACTION
The biggest bone of contention was whether Jarry, with a single blow, had liberated drama from outmoded strictures and enabled it to take any sort of direction it wished in the future, or if he had merely obliterated conventional dramatic forms with brutal mindlessness, failing to replace them with anything significant.

Henry Fouquier of Le Figaro: Jarry's play "brought a kind of release... At least it has begun to put an end to the Terror which has been reigning over our literature."

Henry Bauer of Echo de Paris: "From this huge and strangely suggestive figure of Ubu blows the wind of destruction, of inspiration for contemporary young people, which overthrows the traditional respects and scholarly preconceptions. And the type will remain."

THE SIGNIFICANCE
In its all-pervasive desire to pound human morality to a bloody pulp, Ubu Roi not only served as an extremely grotesque and unflattering funhouse mirror to the ignobility of the human condition, but it also created an entirely new category of drama -- that of absurdism. On that evening in 1896 the Theater of the Absurd was born, ushering in a whole new age of philosophical irrationality. Beckett and Ionesco followed, but Ubu was the first inhuman protagonist in drama, the dramatic harbinger of our own senseless and angst-ridden epoch. Jarry's view of human nature as thoroughly base, and the universe as a foul hell-hole where evil always triumphs, was understandably horrifying to many of those who were exposed to it for the first time. But there was also a transcendent humor -- the ironic humor of someone who was enough of a megalomaniac to sit back and view the entire human condition as a demented puppet theatre.